Halloween Jack-O-Lantern Tea Lights (Comedy/Tragedy)

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Is the small sad pumpkin supposed to have a removable top? I used supports/infill and now I have to grind out the infill - there's a clear line around as if it had a lid on it. Wondering if I cut and pop the top off, if I'll ruin and have to reprint it. The happy pumpkin printed OK without support although the mouth is a little melty; a bit of grinding may improve it.

Attached is what the supports in S3D for my personal prints looked like. I did manual support generation set to "from bed only" to avoid excess support removal inside the pumpkins, just supporting the roof through the tealight hole at the bottom. Then I went through and manually added extra supports inside the mouth of the happy pumpkin.

If your slicer allows you to preview the GCode I find it very helpful to run a preview before determining where you need supports. Often a slicer's generated supports are a little excessive- they err on the side of overcautiousness with what your printers capability might be to ensure prints work properly. When you preview your GCode, play the timeline forward and look out for any time a layer has sections starting in mid air with no connection to the rest of the print- in the case of the pumpkins the top teeth have nothing below them and start in mid air, and so does the middle of the smile and so does the very tops of the heads. So I made sure all of those had supports. The sides of the pumpkins and inside the head really didn't, just the very top of the head.

I'd also suggest to look at several of the makes of this model, you can see in many of them included photos of the supports people used on their prints of the model.

To answer your direct question however- no the model was not designed for the top to be removed, and it wasn't really designed with a ton of infill necessary. I suggested printing with a few outer perimeters to get a fairly solid plastic body, as the model overall is thin enough that you can just print it solid and really not lose much plastic compared to trying to somehow use infill.

Thank you! Your explanation is really helpful in tutoring me about how to analyze and set up a 3D print. I'm going to go over it with another at the Makerspace and learn something new, and maybe print another!

The tea lights I am using are almost exactly that diameter (37.25mm), but it makes for a very tight fit. I also have the Ender3, and had to file a bit to get the tea lights in the 1st one I printed. However I have noted that even with PLA, I have to scale sometimes (so I attributed it to that). On stuff like this where there is only one dimension that needs to fit, I could just go a bit overboard, but I think I printed the 2nd one at 101-102% which was still tight, but I could get them out. It could easily scale higher than that for a loser fit.

Thank you so much for this STLs! Printed mine today, everything printed very well. I only have one problem tin the LED tea light, its not fitting in the the open hole, few millimeters to narrow... think my printer is not printing that accurate. Maybe I will scale the pumpkin a little bit larger, are there any oder solutions to solve this? (Except grind the opening bigger :-D)

The average tea light is 38mm but some might be slightly bigger or slightly smaller. If you have a pair of digital calipers you can see what size your lights are and scale them up to that size. I found the lights I got from the local store were slightly big so I took a needle file and just widened the hole a little bit.

But if you know how large your actual lights are you can do this formula to get what percentage scale you need to print your pumpkins to fit perfect (assuming your printer is printing correctly:

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, looks like the models didn't combine correctly and were separated shells. The combined lanterns print as expected, it was just the solo'd ones that had an issue. I've updated the models in the download to v2 which should fix the problem. Sorry about that, thanks for catching it!

Just as a heads up, someone let me know that the stems on the solo'd models weren't printing correctly- I updated the models to make sure there weren't any separated shells. Just make sure you're using the solo models marked "V2" and you should be fine. The combined lanterns still work as expected, just the solo ones needed an updated.

Yes, supports are needed for the print, infill not so much as the print is thin enough that you're basically printing it solid all the way through. I've added a print settings section in the post now for reference!

Just posted a make. I used the Cura 3.5.0 (Experimental) tree supports which knocked 1 hour off the estimated print time. The tree supports leave a messy interface inside the model, but they were much faster and did not use as much material, so it; was a good trade off.

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